Photo Courtesy of the City Sanitation Department
Sanitation officials are seen here analyzing the latest weather reports on Thursday.
By Michael V. Cusenza
The de Blasio administration has been roundly ripped over the last seven days for the City’s paltry response to an aggressive snow storm on Thursday that belted the five boroughs, paralyzing thoroughfares and snarling traffic from Broad Channel to the Bronx.
Gotham’s first snow storm of the season dumped about six inches of the white stuff on the city, more than most meteorological forecasts. It seemed to catch NYC off-guard at the worst possible time—the evening rush hour—rapidly evolving into an event that unleashed snow at a rate of two inches per hour in some areas. At one point, the outbound span of the George Washington Bridge was shut down due to a 20-car pileup.
“I think the domino effect of that was huge,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday on “The Brian Lehrer Shown” on WNYC-FM.
Hizzoner pledged a “full operational review of what happened” after noting that the City “learned some lessons” from Thursday’s storm.
“I think the crux of this matter was on Wednesday night the National Weather Service was saying one to two inches. We would never have, you know, called out all the troops for one to two inches of snow. Around 10 or 11 on Thursday morning it jumped up to three to five inches; per se, even three to five inches of snow doesn’t do a whole lot to the City of New York. But then it became clear it was going to hit right at rush hour: heavy snow, wet snow, fast snow, obviously early in the season, you know, leaves still on the trees. That’s when it became clear that we were dealing with something very different,” the mayor said. “I think if we could—if we had better knowledge, we would have told people on Wednesday night, ‘Do not drive today, get off the roads, you know, let the snow plows do their work, it’s going to be impossible to move around.’ We’ve done those sorts of snow emergency alerts and people really honor them, but honestly by the time we got that information it was too late to do that.”
On Friday, City Comptroller Scott Stringer sent a letter to City Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia calling the agency’s response to the storm “wholly unacceptable.”
“In a city that routinely experiences heavy snowfalls each year, there is no reason that six inches of snow should have caused problems as severe as school buses taking more than 10 hours to bring kids home,” Stringer fumed.“New Yorkers need a full and complete explanation of what went wrong and how DSNY intends to prevent this from happening again.”
